You joke but they did build (AH scaled down proportions) a child bot model to do the spoof propaganda of the family getting run over by a FRV.
The bots building a "child" robot for the sole purpose of making propaganda to tug at human heartstrings is very on-brand.
Regarding HD1 I never played but I am aware that back then the illuminate were peace-seeking mystics who were throwing together the best they could do in terms of military to defend from super earth, who condemned them as invaders/terrorists, and the cyborgs were undergoing their freedom fighting revolution even if they were all really grisly looking. the OG berserkers are sick.
The illuminate in 1 were the first alien species SE encountered and are (as far as we know) the oldest civilization in the setting, and as a show of good faith during initial peace talks they gave SE the cure to cancer.
They were basically Vulkans but squids.
Super Earth never said they were invaders or terrorists though, they accused the Squids of secretly hiding WMD's that could blow up planets and declared that the squids couldn't be trusted because they used mass mind control on a societal level.
The WMD's were probably bullshit, given we never found any, but the mind control thing was true. Their entire society was basically a big-brain caste system where the bigger brain (Squidzzat) you had the more valuable you were. How
can you trust any kind of deal you make with a people that can literally mindcontrol you and have an entire civilization based on intellectual hierarchy?
We decided that all squid tech would be in safer hands with us, btfo'd them easily, then basically Treaty of Versailles'd them after the war.
They couldn't create ANY weapons and had to hand all of their tech over to us. HD2 then revealed that the squids couldn't hold up their end of the bargain so SE genocided them until they fled the milky way entirely, and were completely unseen and unheard from until 100 years later when they started turning random people into blob zombies out of nowhere.
Oh also Hive Lords aren't from us breeding the bugs for fuel, we only started doing that at the end of the first war and Hive Lords were already a part of the bug ecosystem before then. Afaik the Gloom just mutated the fuck out of them so they grew way bigger.